Recording of Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen's "11 september." The text is from a document called "What is MIR?" which was sent out illegally in Chile in 1974 and from the appeal of MIR two years after the taking over by the junta, on September 11, 1975. A left-wing party, MIR stayed in Chile in order to contribute as efficiently as possible to the building of the opposition. Other sound material also includes sounds from a typewriter and a demonstration at Bastad, Sweden in September 1975 at a tennis match between Sweden and Chile with more than 4,000 participants. The text is taken in small excerpts from the document in Spanish, English, Swedish, Danish, French, Dutch, and Icelandic. The piece consists of three sections overlapping each other gradually, which shows the relationship between the spoken words and the immediate danger connected with that text. The first section "as a spontaneous statement," deals with the document at its direct background: the silence is broken, in spite of the danger connected with the writing, manifolding papers that criticize the politics and methods of the junta and discuss the strategy of the opposition. The second section deals with the document as a medium of discussion. At …

Recording of Reynold Weidenaar's Sweet Jesus and the Honkies. “Sweet Jesus and the Honkies” is ideally meant to be listened to several times in a non-reverberant environment. The piece makes use of recording techniques which enhance the sound, giving it a feeling of depth and spaciousness. By design, these techniques also reduce the intelligibility of the spoken word. Much of the spoken source material for this piece was only moderately intelligible to begin with. The words as they now stand become clear to most listeners only after several hearings. Unfortunately, the listener in a concert hall is not able to listen to the piece as many times as it takes to confirm that he really is hearing what he thinks he’s hearing. And if the hall is reverberant, the intelligibility is reduced, thus making the listener’s task more difficult. Therefore, at the risk of attenuating the dramatic impact of the piece, a transcript of selected portions of the words is herewith appended. But first, some technical notes. The piece was fashioned in the recording studio. No electronic sounds are present; no synthesizer was involved in any way. Sounds were processed by multiple delay, equalization, echo chamber, overload distortion, phasing, expansion, …

Recording of Hildegard Westerkamp's Whisper Study (for two electroacoustic sound tracks). Whisper Study is based on the sentence "When there is no sound, hearing is most alert" (a quote from the Indian mystic Kirpal Singh. Except for the distant horns, all sounds were derived from the composer's voice, whispering the above sentence and the word "silence." Whisper Study started out as an exercise in exploring basic tape techniques in the analog studio of the 70s and using the whispered voice as sound material. Eventually, it became a piece about silence, aural perception and acoustic imagination. Whisper Study explores the place or moment where sound ends and its image begins. The poem "When There is No Sound" by Norbert Ruebstaat was written in direct response to the original version of Whisper Study. The poem in this version is spoken by the composer inside a soundscape of icicles and footsteps in snow, which originally was created for her radio series Soundwalking on Vancouver Co-operative Radio in 1978/79. Eventually this section was mixed with the last part of the original version of Whisper Study.

Recording of Sandra L. Tjepkema's Aubade. This aubade, a serenade whispered into a lover’s ear, just before dawn: It is meant, of course, as a type of erotic poem; but it is not the text alone but the finished product which constitutes the poem. The words (in English) along with complementary phonetic signs and tremulous sighs, seek out the familiar images of love poetry. Phonetic variations on the vocabulary and the breathing of sleeping, dream-talking lovers, the more literal interpretation of such images as tides-on-the-beach, stirring of bedsheets, comforted nightmares, quick leave-fakings, whistling-in-the-dark: these are the elements of this serenade.